Re: Floppy's and CD's: GIMME THAT BACK!

On Tue, 14 Oct 2003, Jeff Albro wrote:

> Annoyance:
> 
> That floppies, CD's or other removable meadia need to be unmounted.  The
> OS has no business telling you what you can and can't do in the physical
> world.  If you press eject, it should eject, and the OS should deal with
> it gracefully.

OK, how about some suggestions on how to deal with such an event gracefully?

If you say "just like Windows does it", then how would you have it deal with
a process that needs to access a file or directory on the manually ejected
media?

- Return endless amounts of null data if it's reading, or throw written data
  away? (alternately, cache the changes somewhere until the media turns up
  again, if it ever does, and hope you don't run out of storage)

- Kill it? Even if it's a $IMPORTANT server?

- Pause it until the media turns up again? Even if it's a $IMPORTANT server?

- Have the access fail in some new, non-UNIX way? What do you do about
  legacy code that doesn't know about the new way?

- Have a "Please insert disc" message pop up? Where? On the console of a
  rack-mounted server in a machine room thousands of miles away from the user?
  On a telnet/ssh connection? Which one? All of them?

> -Jeff

Think the problem through properly and come back to us when you have a
better way of handling the problem than explicit mounting and unmounting.
Then maybe some developer will listen to you and hack some code.

Best Regards,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher      Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK                      Need reliable and secure network systems?
PGP/GnuPG ID:0x271fd950                         <http://www.assursys.com/>